Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Friday, June 14, 2013

Common Core: Commentary on NY TImes Sunday Piece from Ohanian and Daily Howler

Our public schools were now being compared to the world’s most famous shipwreck! And by the way: As
long as this Standard Story is told, our public school teachers will
get blamed for the disaster they have produced. The wreck of the
Hesperus will get blamed on them and their infernal unions. .....does
it make sense to have a uniform set of “standards” for every child in
each grade? Given the large academic gaps within our ginormous student
population, this basic notion has never made a lick of sense. But given
the way our “public discourse” works, this question has almost never
been raised as the so-called “standards movement” has taken hold in the
past twenty years. In their apparent main point, Hacker and
Dreifus worried about the millions of kids—black kids, white kids,
Hispanic kids—who are functioning near the bottom end of the vast
academic ranges found in our public schools. If those kids can’t make it
through high school today, how will they be helped if we make our
“standards” tougher?

We can expect the testing to
get heavier due to another national imposition on schools called the “common
core” with all kinds of ridiculous rules on what and how to teach – really, why
trust teachers to make ANY decisions? You know something weird is going on when
Glen Beck and the tea partiers and right wing Republicans are joining the left
in opposing the Common Core. For the right it is the Obama/Arne Duncan assault
on local control over education. Like let’s teach that the South really won the
Civil War (maybe they did) or that Darwin was really the serpent in the Garden
of Eden. That has been used by CC supporters but the left is not having any of
it, opposing the CC on the heavy testing and control exerted over schools where
they would actually teach important stuff if they were allowed to.

Indiana Reader Comment: There is a winner-takes-all aspect to
the implementation of Common Core that I find chilling. The authors are
right to ask: how does this curriculum account for or prepare those who
don't "make it" (whether that means not finishing high school, not
going to college, or some other form of societal misstep)?
It reminds me of the horribly-named "Race to the Top". Dearies, we
can't all be at the top. By definition. We need to be considering the
80% of our population who aren't, well, the top 20%, and who likely
won't be getting good jobs with good benefits and living out the
American Dream.
Please don't pretend that ensuring a continually higher level of
average academic achievement will somehow produce happier citizens who
feel more secure in their health and well-being. That's nothing more
than an academic arms race.
Los Angeles Reader Comment: Does anyone with a functioning
brain really think that education and standardization have anything in
common? Education by its very definition is the exact opposite of
standardization. Education is a liberating force, the breakdown of
boundaries and limits in pursuit of knowledge in its purest and most
profound sense.
Standardization is great for Microsoft and other businesses that
mass produce a product. But does anyone want their children to think or
be like everyone else? Does anyone even believe such a goal is possible?
One could easier imagine standardized, one-size-fits-all liquor laws
and drivers license tests across these 50 diverse and unique states
before anything approaching standardized education. Yet 45 states have
rushed to embrace Common Core? This hasty and ill-considered attempt to
radically change the very heart of public education in America without
the slightest bit of public discussion is sheer madness.
Westchester County Comment: As a 7th grade English teacher,
this year, I incorporated numerous informational texts to link to the
novels my class was reading. Many of these included New York Times
articles of high interest levels for my 7th graders. It was gratifying
to help students to deconstruct the articles, along with some movie
reviews, so that they could interact directly with well-crafted writing.
It was exciting to see students work to make sense of difficult
vocabulary and to share their interpretations in lively discussions.
On a regular basis, I ask myself: Am I giving them a foundation that
will help to fire up curiosity about how to communicate and to
understand other points of view? Am I helping to demystify novels and
articles and approaches to writing?
Wow. Was I ever asking the wrong questions! The ELA exam wiped my students and me out. We are all demoralized.
During the three days of testing, my students struggled to finish
textbook informational texts that didn't resemble any authentic
newspaper or magazine articles we had studied earlier in class.
If somebody from another planet had visited us on those test days,
s/he/it might conclude that reading is an unpleasant chore and that
writing is something you've got do to shove the words down on the paper,
so you can get it over with; get as far away from the "learning" as
possible, because it is painful.
I'm not on the same page as the Common Core and the Exams.

Here is a different take from Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler. Bob was a long-time teacher in the Baltimore school system so he knows of what he speaks when it comes to education. Somerby talks about a lot of stuff but I love it when he talks education.

Part 4—Including some horrible facts: We’ve been asking the question all week:

How many readers were able to discern the main point of the piece by Hacker and Dreifus in Sunday’s New York Times?

We raised that question at the start of the week, noting the rather jumbled writing the Times didn’t bother to edit. Because their piece was a bit opaque, we wondered how many readers had actually discerned the authors’ (apparent) main point.

The authors seemed to be asking a critical question:
If twenty-five percent of American students can’t get through high
school as matters stand now, what will happen when the “more rigorous”
Common Core standards make the task that much harder?

“Supporters
are confident that students will rise to these challenges and make up
for our country’s lag in the global education race,” Hacker and Dreifus
said at one point in their stroll through the land. “We are not so
sure.”

In our view, Hacker and Dreifus raised an extremely good
point. Yesterday morning, in five separate letters, no one seemed to
realize that this was the question they asked.

We don’t know
what kinds of letters the New York Times may have received. But none of
the letters the paper published addressed the authors’ (apparent) main
point.

That said, two of the letters did recite the
propagandistic Standard Story which dominates our nation’s discussions
of the public schools. We refer to the mandated Standard Story about
“our country’s lag in the global education race,” a Standard Story the
authors themselves recited as part of their piece.

The first
letter-writer praised the new standards, failing to mention the point of
concern Hacker and Dreifus had raised. But as she ended, she tickled
the strings of our nation’s Favorite Song:

“I think that we all agree—the old approach was not working.”

The
old approach has been working reasonably well for a fairly large number
of kids, as we will note below. But it seems to be federal law: You
simply can’t discuss public schools without advancing that Standard Claim.

Another
letter-writer pumped up the volume on this mandated tune. “Isn’t
arguing about the Common Core State Standards rearranging the deck
chairs on the Titanic?” he gloomily wondered.

That was more like it! Our public schools were now being compared to the world’s most famous shipwreck! And by the way:

As
long as this Standard Story is told, our public school teachers will
get blamed for the disaster they have produced. The wreck of the
Hesperus will get blamed on them and their infernal unions.

Alas! These letter writers approached Sunday’s piece like the famous blind men groping the elephant. Though these folk seemed to be down the hall groping parts of a rhino instead.

The
basic point of the piece went unaddressed. But twice, we got to hear
the mandated Standard Story—the familiar old story about how gruesome
our public schools actually are!

Let’s be clear: American students do not
lead the world on international tests. On most measures, the Asian
tigers outscore the rest of the world, the United States included.

On
the other hand, we aren’t exactly on the Titanic, though everyone and
his crazy uncle seems to know that such a claim must, by law, be made.

Sorry, Virginia! American students do not
“score well below their European peers in reading and math,” the false
claim advanced by Hacker and Dreifus midway through their piece. Even on
the international test the authors cherry-picked for maximum gloom,
American students outscored their peers from Germany, France and England.

But
so what? Everyone from Hacker on down repeats the Standard Story,
preferably in a demonstrably bogus form. But then, the Standard Tales
which control our discourse are typically built upon two kinds of
facts—invented and withheld.

Today, let’s look at some facts which get withheld from your view when public schools get discussed. You will never see these facts when your upper-end press corps pretends to discuss public schools.

Some
of these facts are almost uplifting; some of these facts are horrific.
All these facts open the window onto our brutal history. But all these
facts are actual facts—and they are highly relevant to Hacker and Dreifus’ apparent main point.

These facts are constantly withheld from your view. Although they routinely appear in major reports, you are never shown them.

Let’s
start with the semi-gloomy facts which Hacker and Dreifus misstated.
Below, you see average scores in reading literacy on the 2009 PISA, the
international tests on which the professors chose to focus:

As
you can see, the United States outscored the major European nations,
though sometimes by small margins. The New York Times should file a
detailed, prominent correction of the claim made by its high scholars.

(If they do, they will of course load it with other cherry-picked facts.)

That
said, the United States was outscored on this test, in a “measurably
different” way, by half a dozen nations. Prompted by endless propaganda,
excitable people may compare this to an outing on the Titanic.

If they do, the New York Times will rush their cries into print.

Propagandized
people will wring their hands over this gruesome result. Below, we’ll
present a different, more detailed version of this list.

We will
include some additional facts, including some which are horrifying. The
National Center for Educational Statistics gives prominent placement to
these “disaggregated” scores; scroll down to page 14. But when you read about public schools, these facts are always withheld, perhaps because they are accurate:

Propagandists
and tribalists will interpret those “disaggregated” scores in various
ways. But only to the extent that they’re forced to view them, since
these facts are always withheld when we discuss public schools.

Some
of those scores are almost encouraging; others are horrifying. For
ourselves, we will say that the worst of those scores represents the
effect of three centuries of brutal racial history, in which our
benighted ancestors worked very hard, for three hundred years, to eliminate literacy from one major segment of the American nation.

Aside from that, how did you like the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries? With Jim Crow to follow?

That much said, we’ll ask two questions. Let’s start with the first:

Even
on this cherry-picked test, do our schools seem like the Titanic when
you look at the average score of white students? These are the kids
whose ancestors weren’t violently stripped of access to literacy for roughly three hundred years, depending on when you stop counting.

That
is this country’s mainstream majority population, the population of
kids whose ancestors weren’t violently stripped of the culture of
literacy. (Some of those other countries have nothing but a
mainstream majority population. To their credit, they didn’t direct
three centuries of violence at segments of their populations.) And yes,
that average score includes the work of the gap-toothed, shoeless,
yahoo-raised kids we fiery liberals like to picture in the southern red
states.

Do our schools really seem like the Titanic when you look at that average score?

That
said, the average score on this test by American black kids is close to
horrifying. It must be said, because it’s true, that many black kids
are doing extremely well in school. And it must be said that Americans
kids of all descriptions tend to score better on other international
tests.

In Massachusetts, black kids outscored Finland in math on the 2011 TIMSS! To review those inspiring numbers, click this.
Remember, the authors cherry-picked the PISA because it provides the
gloomiest scores. This is one of the basic ways the nation gets
propagandized.

We reach our second question:

Our nation
still lives in the backwash of centuries of brutal racial history.
Meanwhile, many black kids do extremely well in school; many white kids
do quite poorly. But on the 2009 PISA, our white kids were reading, on
average, like kids from middle-class, unicultural Finland. On average,
our black kids were closer to Mexico.

In such a country, does
it make sense to have a uniform set of “standards” for every child in
each grade? Given the large academic gaps within our ginormous student
population, this basic notion has never made a lick of sense. But given
the way our “public discourse” works, this question has almost never
been raised as the so-called “standards movement” has taken hold in the
past twenty years.

In their apparent main point, Hacker and
Dreifus worried about the millions of kids—black kids, white kids,
Hispanic kids—who are functioning near the bottom end of the vast
academic ranges found in our public schools. If those kids can’t make it
through high school today, how will they be helped if we make our
“standards” tougher?

For kids who are struggling as it is, won’t
tougher standards just make matters worse? Hacker and Dreifus seemed to
be asking that (very important) question.

Almost
all our public discussions are built around two kinds of facts. The
cluelessness of our elites was on display in Monday’s reports, which
tended to withhold basic facts about our nation’s academic divides.

1 comment:

There were 2 excellent pieces that day, but the NYTimes only allowed comments on one. The other was written by an impassioned English teacher.

Then later on in another publication I found a piece written by a well-know science writer who now refuses to write text for tests. But when publishers gave her outlines, she felt her own individualism compromised as well as the interest level that would be hurt if she followed the CC outline.

Comments are welcome. Irrelevant and abusive comments will be deleted, as will all commercial links. Comment moderation is on, so if your comment does not appear it is because I have not been at my computer (I do not do cell phone moderating).

UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

Why Karen Lewis Reads Ed Notes

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Hedges says, There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

GEM's Julie Cavanagh Debates E4E member on NY1 on LIFO and Seniority

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

A Familiar Voice on Unions

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Outsource our children

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.